The general trend in games today has gravitated toward computerized video games that are mainly single-player games where the player memorizes the steps of the game that are required to achieve the objective. The player then continuously repeats the steps to improve his/her time.
With the advent of video games came a decline in games between two or more players competing face-to-face against each other where the object is to defeat the opponent by outwitting him/her. Traditionally this was an important feature of games and such games between two people were a major means of entertainment and social interaction.
Many games today, however, are played by a single player with no other person participating or watching. At the end of the game the player receives a “score” for the points he/she has accumulated during the game. An opponent or the original player then tries to match or beat the original player's score. There is no player-to-player real-time opposition.
Some existing games such as the cubic game board (U.S. Pat. No. 4,129,303) have attempted to enhance the popularity of the game board concept by making the game three-dimensional. The playing surface, however, continues to be planar even though multiple planes are incorporated into the game device.
Another game apparatus (U.S. Pat. No. 3,046,016) transforms the traditional tic-tac-toe game into three-dimensions. The apparatus is designed strictly for this one game and requires points or “playing stations” at all intersections of the rings and additional intermittent “playing stations” between each adjacent pair of intersections. By including intermittent points which only have two adjacent points, the game complexity is diminished.
Another adaptation of the tic-tac-toe concept is a game apparatus (U.K. Patent No. 1,344,259) by Frank Fox. It is a three-dimensional representation of the British game of noughts and crosses which has at least two 3×3 arrays of contiguous areas with at least one area common to two such arrays. Each array has nine compartments (three different shapes: square, rectangular and triangular) formed by the 3×3 game board where two players alternately put crosses and circles in the compartments. The objective is to be the first player to get three crosses or three circles in contiguous compartments. The game is also called tic-tac-toe, tit-tat-toe, ticktacktoe and ticktacktoo. This game, as the others discussed above, does not have desired characteristics such as visualization of spatial relations, increased ability of players to visualize three-dimensional images and increased complexity. It also lacks a means of identifying the winning alignment on the sphere and is limited to playing patterns which are composed of 3×3 grids.